![]() ![]() PFEIFFER: I don't want to give too much away. And so a lot of my grandmother's thoughts about creation are mine in some sense, thinking about the act of creativity and creating with intentionality. And I just loved imagining how she might look at different materials and try to design them and put together and what her design aesthetic might be in the same way that I, as a writer, think very carefully about the kind of language that I use, the kind of sentences that I create, the kind of characterization and setting that I try to create with my words. HAMBURGER: I relate to my grandmother as a creative artist - as somebody who expressed herself through design. And your grandmother felt transformed by wearing those pants. There's a line where you say, before the Great War, when people cared about what they looked like, and then there's a line where they talk about clothes teaching the world to treat people with dignity. There are several times in your novel that you mention clothing. PFEIFFER: I want to go back to that photo you mentioned of your grandmother wearing pants in the early 1900s - so surprising. You can see a number of people who find Havana to be this kind of liminal space where more things are possible than they would be in the more sort of straight-laced American society that they came from. And just thinking about the varied cast of characters that the main character, Pearl, in the story, based on my grandmother, comes into contact with. ![]() And so that was my thought behind that remark. And for some reason they sort of don't fit in at home, and they end up becoming expatriates and living in other countries. Sometimes you do meet those people who - they thrive in other places. HAMBURGER: I've actually been an expatriate a few times in my life, and it's interesting. And was it just that anyone who leaves their native country is leaving something they've failed at, or is it specific to people who leave the U.S.? PFEIFFER: There's a point in the novel where someone makes an observation, and they say, when Americans come here to live - meaning Cuba - it's generally because they've failed at something back home. And I love how she summed up the decision to go in the recorded interviews - three little words - (imitating his grandmother) so I vent (ph). So my grandmother decided to go with her sister to Cuba - a place she had never been. They were saying, hey, just go to Cuba for a year, and then you can get into the United States. And the steamboat companies that were missing out on a lot of this income that they'd been making from ferrying immigrants over to the United States were actively promoting this as an alternate destination. You were coming in from whatever that country was. But if you could get to Cuba or Argentina or Mexico, you could establish residency there for a year, and then you weren't coming in from Eastern Europe. And so there was a loophole in this law which said that you couldn't come to America from Eastern Europe. And the vast majority of immigrants who were coming from Eastern Europe were Jewish. And so there were these new laws enacted, first in 1921 and then in 1924 - which actually became the basis for immigration laws, you know, going forward for many years - that limited immigration from Eastern Europe. HAMBURGER: There was a kind of hysteria going on in the United States and in many other places - a fear that what happened in Russia with the communist revolution would happen in other places. I asked Aaron Hamburger why both women - his grandmother and the character based on her - ended up in the Caribbean on their way to the U.S. But she's diverted to Cuba, and that changes how she views the world. PFEIFFER: That picture and the tale behind it are the impetus for his latest novel, "Hotel Cuba." It's about a young woman named Pearl who, in the 1920s, leaves Eastern Europe's poverty and antisemitism for the United States. ![]() ![]() And that's why I was so surprised to find this image of her from 1922, which is in the book, of her dressed in full male drag. HAMBURGER: She was really kind of a wonderful presence, but I didn't really know her as a person that well, aside from, you know, the way a little boy would know his grandmother. She would make these quote-unquote "rock cookies" that were warm and soft out of the oven and an hour later were hard as rocks. She was kind of the idea of what you would imagine a Yiddish Bubbie to be. The author Aaron Hamburger thought his grandmother's immigration journey was worthy of a book, too, especially when he found an old photo of her that didn't quite fit with the woman he knew.ĪARON HAMBURGER: She was very loving. Immigration stories are inspiration for countless novels. ![]()
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